After almost two decades of chicken keeping, I finally had a case of bumblefoot in my flock. Sometimes bumblefoot is due to getting a splinter or a cut in the bottom of the foot. Typically, bumblefoot occurs when a heavy hen injures herself jumping off of a roost. All of this leads to a infection inside the pad of the foot which results in severe swelling and pain. If the injury isn’t attended to, the infection can spread up the leg and kill the bird.

Of course, it wasn’t one of my heavy and older hens that got bumblefoot. It was lithe and skinny Tina, which shows that there’s always an exception to the rule. She wasn’t limping too badly, but the swelling was hard to miss.

Inspection of the underside showed a scab, or plug.

A trip the vet would have cost several hundred dollars, which in all honesty, I am not willing to spend on Tina. Besides, the travel and anesthesia would have been stressful for her. I decided to take care of this on my own. I got out my chicken medicine kit. I pulled on some disposable gloves – the infective agent is usually a staphylococci bacterium, something that, if accidentally ingested, could do me harm.

No one was home, so I had to do this one-handed. (Which also limited the ability to take photos during the operation!)

I held Tina in one arm, snug against me, holding the foot with my left hand. In my right hand I wielded sharp tweezers. With a bit of twisting and digging, I pulled off the plug. I was surprised that only a trickle of gunky liquid oozed out. I squeezed. Nothing. I inserted the tweezers into the now open hole and felt around. Meanwhile, Tina was more annoyed at being held than at what I was doing to her foot. She only squawked once during this entire operation. The tweezers found a hard solid mass which I grabbed with the sharp tips and pulled out. It was a lump the size, shape and hardness of a peanut. With more probing and poking, I pulled out a second one. My guess is that these are a combination of infected fluids and tissue that solidified, rather like a pearl in an oyster building up in layers.

I rinsed out the foot with running water. I generously squirted a broad spectrum antibiotic ointment (purchased from the vet for an injury some time ago), into the hole. I covered the pad with a strip of clean bandage, and held it all on with duct tape. I used dark brown duct tape – the silver encourages pecking. I put Tina back into the pen with the other hens. After a couple of funny struts and a peek at her bandaged foot, she walked off, looking as normal as Tina ever looks. That evening she roosted with the others.

I changed her bandage the next day, and although there was still some swelling,

the foot looked deflated. I bandaged her up again, and even with cotton and duct tape attached, Tina walked without hesitation or limp.

Two days later I removed the bandage and soaked Tina’s foot in a warm epsom salt bath. (I used a half-cup of epsom salts in the tub.) I did this to draw out any remaining infection and to deep clean the foot. It was easiest to soak Tina, too, and she seemed to like it. She settled right in.

There was still some swelling in her foot, and the hole was open so I poked around with the tweezers, but didn’t find anything nasty inside.

I squirted in some more antibiotic ointment and bandaged her once more. That bandage fell off two days later and upon inspection, the foot pad appeared healed. I let it be.

A week later the foot seems healthy again. Compare it to the other foot. There’s nothing pretty about chicken feet, especially on older hen’s dirty, scaly, lumpy feet. But, having seen this foot ballooned up with infection, it looks darn good now.

I’ve talked with others who have more experience than I with bumblefoot. Some chickens get recurring infections. Some, despite surgery, never recover. I hope that I don’t see a case for another two decades. But if I do, I hope I’ll be as successful treating it as I was this time around.

It’s been muggy and hot here, so bad that the very thought of turning on the stovetop makes me wilt. If I could survive on iced tea and lemonade, I would. My appetite is down, but I still need to eat. This is the time of year when salads take the center of the stage in my kitchen, and when dinner can be as deceptively simple as tomatoes and mozzarella.

For this salad, I thickly sliced that one-pound Rose tomato and fanned it out on a plate. I sliced a round of fresh mozzarella, and alternated it with the tomato. I snipped basil and parsley from the garden and tucked the leaves in between the slices. I drizzled on my best olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar that is molasses-thick and sweet. A few grinds of salt and pepper completed the dish.

If this doesn’t seem like a full dinner to you, turn it into a sandwich (excellent on French bread.) Chop and toss with leftover cooked pasta for a salad. Or, serve as a side with leftover roasted chicken. But for me, on a hot summer night, this was all that I needed.

It’s no surprise that all three Buff Orpingtons are in the nesting boxes.

It’s even less of a surprise that two of the three are broody.

It’s easy to tell which hen is not. Amber (my favorite of the group) is about to lay an egg (good girl!) Her head is up. The other two are flattened out, chrrr-chrring bad-tempered warnings, and have glazed looks in their eyes.

Amber is on the left. Now that I pointed out the difference, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Check out their combs, too. Topaz’s is half the size and paler, a sure sign that she’s not laying.

Of the three, I will be putting Beryl in the anti-broody coop today because in her deranged state, when she spies an egg in a nesting box she clambers over and claims it. She’ll leave one egg to go and sit on another. She’ll do this even if the laying hen is still there, finishing up. She shoves and stomps. She breaks eggs. It’s annoying and wasteful, so she’ll spend three days literally cooling off. When I return her to the coop she won’t be broody anymore. But, I’ll bet she starts molting. It’s that time of year (more on molting in another post this week.)

There’s one more broody hen in my flock, and this one might surprise you.

Betsy! She’s so diminutive that when she flattens out in the nesting box I have to peer in to see her. Both Tina and Siouxsie are laying. When Betsy sits on their two long white eggs she looks off-kilter, as if she’s going to fall off of them. Betsy doesn’t smash eggs and she rarely lays. I’m leaving her be.

This is the epitome of summer.

Sometimes I go and stand in my garden just to inhale that green tomato plants smell. In August that sharp scent is more appealing to me than any blooming flower.

This tomato is an Amish heirloom called Rose. I’ve never grown it before, and I relied on the scant tag information at purchase. “Large” it said. Right! The tomato pictured above weighed in at 1 pound, 3 ounces! At $4 a pound for tomatoes at the farmers market, this one hefty tomato has doubled my money back on the price of the seedling. When it’s a good year for tomatoes, as this one is so far, I can ignore the borer in my squash vines and the wilting cucumbers. The tomatoes carry the day!

The flavor of this Rose variety is better than Brandywine.  It’s so good that I’ve used the first few of the harvest simply for slicing and eating out of hand. But, soon I expect a whole lot of tomatoes to ripen at once. I’ll be making quick tomato sauces to freeze for use in the winter.

So far, my tomatoes are the stars of my late summer garden. (I’ll have to do another post on the cherry tomatoes I’m growing this year!) What are you harvesting that makes you happy?

My town’s newspaper is called The Mosquito, and for good reason. Despite being less than thirty miles from Boston, this community is small (under 5,000 residents) because much of the acreage is wetlands. In the summer it sometimes seems as if the main thing that we grow are blood-sucking pests.

This is why there is one voracious and unrelenting predator that I welcome to my yard. The dragonfly. The dragonfly’s prey of choice are mosquitos, gnats and deer flies. I’d hesitate to work in the garden without this effervescent beauty clearing the air of biting insects. The dragonfly ignores humans. It’s as if we don’t exist. It’s not uncommon for one to land on me, as if I were just another plant. For a moment it’s like wearing living jewelry.